Less than two months have passed since the end of Israel’s grisly war on Gaza. Not a house has been re-built (there is no cement; Israel continues to ban its entry into Gaza), thousands are displaced or sheltering in an overcrowded relative’s house or renting a scarcely-available apartment. The aid has stockpiled on the other side of crossings into Gaza, many trucks being sent back or expired. And the pain of loss, let alone of seeing family members -children, siblings, parents-burned by white phosphorous, being murdered or left to bleed to death is still unbearably fresh.
Yet Palestinians are trying to move on, again, while dealing with a siege which has only tightened post-destruction of Gaza. Last week Palestinian youths held a concert in the burnt-out theatre in one of the al Quds hospital buildings, attacked and seriously damaged by Israel during its war on Gaza [more than 14 hospitals and medical centres were bombed and damaged by Israeli army, 2 clinics were destroyed, 44 other damaged, and 23 emergency workers and medics were killed].
Land Day in Gaza
Palestinian child holds sign
Dabka in the ruins of Quds hospital
Gazan youth
Women in Gaza mark Land Day
Dabka in the fields
Quds Concert
Charred walls as a backdrop, piles of twisted metal, burnt rafters, and the ash of destroyed walls framing the stage, the next generation of Palestinian parents and leaders stood proud last Thursday, saying with their presence, as well as singing, “we will not go down”. The Michael Heart song written during Israel’s 3 weeks of attacks on Gaza caught the spirit of what Palestinians have been saying and living for decades, since the Zionists first began -even before Israel was created on the smoking ruins of Palestinian villages -their assassinations and acts of terrorism designed to frighten and drive out the existing Palestinian population.
On stage, a youth troupe of Dabke dancers held their own, did justice to the art that is Dabke. What was evident more than the skill of the musicians and dancers was Palestinians’ drive to live, to laugh, to show off and share their love of life. Just as with a concert organized by several youths last November to lift the spirits of Palestinians in Gaza living under a suffocating siege, the crowd clearly reveled in the opportunity for joy …after so much tragedy.
Land Day
In Gaza’s northern Beit Hanoun region, Palestinians, led by women, marched to land in the Israel-imposed “buffer zone” to tend the remaining trees and proclaim their right to the land. The area once flourished with olive, lemon, orange, guava and almond trees, in the years before Israeli invasions razed them to the ground, simultaneously razing history and life. Following Isreal’s latest bout of destruction upon Gaza, most sources cite 60,000-75,000 dunams (1 dunam is 1,000 square metres) of fertile, cultivable land as having been destroyed by Israeli tanks and bulldozers. In Gaza’s perimeter areas, the “buffer zone” annexes land to Israel, gobbling up rich soil which had served Gaza’s agricultural needs. As of the last attacks on Gaza, as much as 60 % of the agriculture industry has been destroyed by Israel, further rendering Gazans aid-dependent.
Yet, again despite the gravity of the bleak situation Palestinians are facing, all over Palestine, on Land Day their voices were loud in protest, in defiance, and in joy. Organized by Beit Hanoun’s Local Initiative, a group leading agricultural and social projects in the northern region, Land Day celebrants sang, danced Dabke, tended their trees, and celebrated being on their land. On any given normal day, most of the residents would hesitate to go to this border region area due to the Israeli soldiers’ shooting which routinely erupts dangerously close to anyone on the land.
“We were still young and in love. We had all of our dreams,” Muhammad Abu Jerrad said, holding a photo of his wife by the sea. Wafa Abu Jerrad was one of at least six killed by three flechette bombs fired by Israeli tanks in the Ezbet Beit Hanoun area, northern Gaza, on 5 January.
The dart bomb attacks came the morning after invading Israeli soldiers killed 35-year-old paramedic Arafa Abd al-Dayem. Along with another medic and ambulance driver, Abd al-Dayem was targeted by the lethal darts just after 10:10am on 4 January while trying to aide civilians already attacked by Israeli forces in northern Gaza’s Beit Lahia area. Within two hours of being shredded by multiple razor-sharp darts, Arafa Abd al-Dayem died as a result of slashes to his lungs, limbs and internal organs.
Khalid Abu Saada, the driver of the ambulance, testified to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights: “I was told that there were injured people near the western roundabout in Beit Lahiya town. When we arrived, we saw a person who had been critically injured. The two paramedics climbed out of the ambulance to evacuate him into the ambulance. I drove approximately 10 meters ahead in order to evacuate another injured person. Then, an [Israeli] tank fired a shell at us. The shell directly hit the ambulance and 10 civilians, including the two paramedics, were injured.”
From his al-Shifa hospital bed the day after the attack, 21-year-old volunteer medic Alaa Sarhan, lacerated legs bandaged, confirmed the account. More than two months later, he remains wheelchair-bound, lacerated muscles and ligaments still too damaged for walking.
In the same post-attack hospital room as Sarhan was Thaer Hammad, one of the injured civilians whom medics had come to the region to retrieve. In the initial shelling that day, Hammad lost his foot when Israeli tanks fired at, according to Hammad, a region filled with terrified civilians fleeing Israeli bombing. His friend Ali was shot in the head while trying to evacuate Hammad. The medics then arrived. Abd al-Dayem and Sarhan had loaded Hammad into the ambulance and were going to retrieve Ali’s body when the flechette shell was fired at the medics and fleeing civilians. Ali was decapitated, and Abd al-Dayem received the injuries which would claim his life within hours.
Dr. Bakkar Abu Safia, head of the emergency department at al-Shifa hospital, treated Abd al-Dayem at Awda Hospital in Beit Lahiya.
“Arafa had received a direct hit on his chest, which was torn open, and had many small puncture wounds on his right and left arms. He had massive internal bleeding in his abdomen from the injury to his liver, and had blood in his lung. After we had closed his wounds and were transferring him to [the intensive care unit], he arrested. He had irreversible shock,” Dr. Bakkar said.
Wafe, killed by a flechette bomb
Wafa Abu Jerrad, 21 years old and pregnant, was with her husband Muhammad, their two children, and relatives on the morning of her murder. At around 9:30am, they were eating breakfast in a sunny patch outside the front door of their home in what Muhammad described as a “calm” period. “Nothing was happening, not then, not half an hour earlier. It was calm. We were sitting outside because it felt safe.”
“We heard explosions, coming from up the street near the Abd al-Dayem house. We knew of Arafa’s death the day before,” Muhammad Abu Jerrad explained, saying the family moved to the side of the house to see what was happening.
“We saw bodies on the ground everywhere outside the Abd al-Dayem mourning tents. Wafa panicked and told us to go back inside, so we ran to the front of the house. We were all very worried.”
Abu Jerrad’s father Khalil and some of the family had made it inside the house, and Abu Jerrad himself was stepping in the doorway, two-year-old son Khalil in his arms, Wafa to his left, when they were struck by the darts of a new shelling.
The dart bomb exploded in the air, Wafa dropped to ground, struck by flechettes into the head, chest and back. She was killed instantly.
“I was struck at the same time, in my right arm and in my back,” Abu Jerrad recalled. “I fell over with my wife, passing out. I came to shortly after and saw my wife covered in blood. I picked her up and carried her to the car, running. Then I passed out again from the pain.”
Although Abu Jerrad’s father Khalil had been inside the doorway, he too was hit by the darts. Abu Jerrad’s son Khalil was hit by darts in his right foot and in one finger. One of the flechettes that struck Abu Jerrad remains deeply embedded near his spinal cord. Doctors fear removing the dart would injure a nerve and leave Abu Jerrad paralyzed.
According to Dr. Bakkar, in Gaza it won’t be possible for Abu Jerrad to get the surgery he needs. “We don’t have qualified specialists to do such intricate surgery in Gaza. He’d need surgery outside.” With more than 280 patients dead after being prevented by Israel, which controls Gaza’s borders, from reaching medical treatment outside of Gaza, Abu Jerrad holds no prospect of being granted permission by Israeli authorities to leave Gaza for surgery.
Although he is in considerable pain due to the sharp dart still lodged in his back, Abu Jerrad said the pain of his injury is minor compared to the loss of his wife.
“‘Where’s mommy? Where’s mommy?'” Abu Jerrad said two-year-old Khalil asks all the time. “Mommy has been hurt,” he tells him, kissing a photo of his wife and making the sound of an explosion, knowing that there is no way of softening the truth for his son.
“We’re totally innocent. We have nothing to do with rockets. We were just living in the house.”
The house still bears the evidence of the dart bomb: numerous darts still firmly entrenched in the concrete wall where the darts flew. Some of the darts still have fins visibly peeking out of concrete, others seem to be but nails poking out from the wall.
The Guardian (UK) newspaper published a graphic illustrating how upon a timed explosion in the air, flechette darts are designed to spread out conically, covering a vast area which Amnesty International cites as 300 meters wide and 100 meters long, inflicting the maximum number of injuries possible. In the case of a densely-populated region like the Gaza Strip, the number of potentially-injured is deathly high. The same graphic shows how the head of the dart is designed to break away. Having penetrated inside a person, this breakage inflicts a second wound per single dart entry, multiplying the amount of internal damage done by the razor-like darts, which Amnesty International said number between 5,000 and 8,000 per shell.
Dr. Bassam al-Masari, a surgeon at Beit Lahiya’s Kamal Adwan hospital, reiterated that flechettes cause more injuries than other bombs precisely because they spread in a larger area. And while the darts appear innocuously small, their velocity and design enable them to bore through cement and bones and “cut everything internal,” said al-Masari. Accordingly, the prime cause of death is severe internal bleeding from slashed organs, particularly the heart, liver and brain. “Brain injuries are the most fatal,” said al-Masari.
A few minutes up the road from the Abu Jerrad home, 57-year-old Jamal Abd al-Dayem and his wife, 50-year-old Sabah, grieve the deaths of their two sons, victims of the indiscriminate flechettes.
“Every time I think of them, every time I sit by their grave, I feel like I’m going to crumble. I was so happy with them,” Sabah Abd al-Dayem said.
Jamal Abd al-Dayem explained the events. “After my cousin Arafa was martyred on 4 January, we immediately opened mourning houses, with separate areas for men and women. The next day, at 9:30am the Israelis struck the mourning area where the men were. It was clearly a mourning house, on the road, open and visible. Immediately after the first strike, the Israelis hit the women’s mourning area.” Two strikes within 1.5 minutes, he reported.
“When Arafa was martyred, my sons cried so much their eyes were red and swollen with grief. The next day they were martyred,” the father said, shaking his head in disbelief.
“Just like that, I lost two sons. One of them was newly married, his wife eight months pregnant.”
Twenty-nine-year-old Said Abd al-Dayem died after one day in the hospital, succumbing to the fatal injuries of darts in his head. His unmarried brother, Nafez Abd al-Dayem, 23, was also struck in head by the darts and died immediately.
The surviving son, 25-year-old Nahez Abd al-Dayem, was hit by two darts in his abdomen, one in his chest, and another in his leg.
Rami al-Loloh shows his scar from the dart
“I went to the mourning house to pay respects to my cousin, Arafa. When we arrived at the men’s mourning house, there was a sudden explosion and I felt pain in my chest. Very quickly after, there was a second strike. This second attack was more serious as people had rushed to the area to help the wounded. I looked up from the second shelling and saw that my cousins Arafat and Islam had been hit. They were lying on the ground, wounded.”
Sixteen-year-old Islam Abd al-Dayem was struck in the neck and died slowly, in great agony, after three days in the hospital. Fifteen-year-old Arafat Abd al-Dayem died instantly.
When Nahez Abd al-Dayem regained consciousness in hospital, he learned of his two dead brothers and two dead cousins. The dart that lodged in his leg was surgically removed, but three darts remain in his chest and abdomen and will stay there, although Abd al-Dayem says they bother him. “When I move at night, I feel a lot of pain,” he said. But an operation to search for them is too dangerous and could cause greater injury.
The dart shelling on the Abd al-Dayem and Abu Jerrad houses killed six and injured at least 25, including a 20-year-old nephew paralyzed from the neck down after darts severed his spinal cord. Darts which spread as far as 200 meters from the scene are still embedded in walls of houses.
Atalla Muhammad Abu Jerrad, 44 years old, explained, “I was near the mourning house, on my way to the market. I saw everything. My brother Otalla, 37, was in the area. He was injured by a nail that drilled through his shoulder, and lodged in his neck. He had to have an operation to remove it.”
Sabah Abd al-Dayem said she finally understands the expression “burning with pain.” “Every minute, every hour I think of them. My son didn’t have time to enjoy married life. I wish I had died with them.”
“In five or six months, you’ll see the effects on her,” Jamal Abd al-Dayem said of his wife. “She isn’t eating, drinking, or sleeping. I’ve hidden all the photos of our sons and closed off [their] room.” The photos he’d mentioned had been laid out on display. Pictures of their sons at different ages and stages of life. A photo of Said graduating from university.
Jamal Abd al-Dayem, tall, with a salt and pepper beard and hair, and deep smile wrinkles, is equally affected.
“Our lives have stopped. We don’t go to any joyful places, don’t do anything fun. We just mourn our sons and their lost lives. Our children are precious to us. We raised them and now they’re gone. Said’s wife has gone back to her parents’ house. She can’t bear it here. Now half of our household is gone. What have we done? What fault is it of ours? There was no need to target the mourning houses.”
Their youngest daughter, 14-year-old Eyat, used to be at the top of her class, her parents said. Now, they said, she suffers at school, crying in class, thinking of two dead brothers. “She can’t concentrate,” Jamal Abd al-Dayem said. “Her brain is closed.”
Aside from the memories of the day his sons were martyred, Jamal Abd al-Dayem has tangible reminders of their deaths. From a pink paper bag decorated with teddy bears and hearts he brought out a single flechette, one of the many he’s kept from the thousands unleashed on his family and relatives.
Yet it is out of more than sentimentality that Abd al-Dayem has kept the darts. He wants justice.
“Our sons’ lives are not cheap, can’t just let them go like that. If they die a natural death, that’s one thing. But like this? Where are our rights? We want a trial. What right [is there] to bomb a mourning house?”
Amnesty International and many other recognized rights organizations have long been critical of Israel’s use of flechette bombs in the densely-populated Gaza Strip. The group Physicians for Human Rights-Israel says Israel’s use of flechette bombs is in contravention to the Geneva conventions. B’Tselem, an Israeli rights group, reported that at least 17 Palestinians were killed by dart bombs from 2000 through the 18 April 2008 killing of a Palestinian cameraman and three other civilians, including two minors, by a flechette bomb in Gaza.
The attack raised renewed alarm among international rights groups about Israel’s use of the indiscriminate and deadly dart bombs. Joe Stork, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch (HRW), said that the “use of flechette shells, with a wide ‘kill radius,’ increases the chance of indiscriminately hitting civilians,” adding that Israel “should stop its use of the weapon in Gaza, which is one of the most densely populated areas on Earth.”
Years before, HRW’s Hanny Megally had noted Israel’s usage of the darts in Gaza only, versus in the occupied West Bank where the illegal Israeli settlements and Israeli military bases are in many areas intertwined with Palestinian residential areas. Whereas using dart bombs in a Gaza district only puts Palestinians in neighboring areas at risk, the use of such flechettes would put many of the nearly 500,000 illegal Israeli settlers at risk of injury.
Despite Israeli officials’ frequent justifications that the use of flechettes is permitted under international law, there are guidelines to this usage which the Israeli military continues to willfully ignore.
It is precisely the use of flechettes in densely populated areas which contravene the internationally-accepted principles of war: the inability of the dart bombs to distinguish between military targets and civilians; and the lack of precaution at avoiding civilian injury or death.
The two-inch-long scar on Rami al-Lohoh’s right shoulder is his reminder of the painful dart which had penetrated deeply beneath the flesh of his shoulder area. The 11-year-old was too shy to speak of his injury, but obligingly pulled his shirt aside to reveal the scar. X-rays taken after the dart had embedded in al-Lohoh reveal the depth of its penetration.
“The doctors were afraid of this type of injury, so they hesitated before doing the operation to remove the dart,” Rami’s father Darwish al-Lohoh explained. After a 2.5 hour operation, the potentially deadly dart was removed.
Hossam al-Lohoh, Rami’s 13-year-old brother, recalled in detail where the family was when he was hit by multiple flechette darts.
“We were walking near [our friend] Ayman’s home. The Israelis fired a missile. When the missile hit the road it exploded and all the pieces inside spread widely. It felt like someone had thrown many, many stones at me. We looked for somewhere safe to run to for shelter. We ran into a small street. I felt a huge pain in my head and legs then I passed out.” Hossam al-Lohoh, currently forced to limp, will need another operation six months later to repair the damaged nerves in his leg.
The 10-member al-Lohoh family, including eight youths, had taken refuge in the home of Ayman Qader, half a kilometer away, but had returned briefly to check on their home in Nusseirat refugee camp, central Gaza, on 13 January. Israeli tanks, which were stationed at the former Netzarim settlement, unleashed the flechette bomb as the family walked down Salah al-Din, the main north-south road. It was just after 3pm and the family was approximately 20 meters from the Qader home when the Israeli tanks shelled the group of civilians.
“The street was filled with darts,” 25-year-old Amer al-Mesalha recalled. He was among the 13 persons injured by the darts, most of whom were attempting to take refuge in a UN school. Mesalha had darts surgically removed from his hand and leg but still has two remaining in his abdomen, the entry point his lower back near the spine. Like the other victims, Mesalha is forced to accept the darts’ presence in his stomach. He said he has to be careful not to jump or move the metal bits inside him. Mesalha believes the Israeli soldiers knew who they were targeting. “The Israelis could see the group of people; they aimed at us.”
An elderly man saw me walking the other morning. “Bless you, bless you,” he said, holding out his palm as I gave him 20 shekels.
What has rendered a man in his late years impoverished and begging, in a manner Palestinians are not accustomed to?
I followed him home yesterday. It took some doing, as the name he had told me, while correct, didn’t seem to register with his wife when my friend Mohammed called. Establishing that he was the same man I’d met on the street took some time two days ago. Then locating his home in a swirl of alleys after the Sahaa market area took more doing.
But we finally reached it and I saw the same beaming older man, greeting us with the same enthusiasm and gratitude of two weeks ago.
Mohammad Ahmad Kahawish lives in the Tuffahh area, a neighbourhood in Gaza city’s older area. His family is unusually small for a Palestinian family, with only 3 children. His house is also small, and now is quite damaged from the intense shelling during Israel’s 3 weeks of attacks on Gaza.
“The house jumped from side to side with every missile,” his wife explained.
He’s fortunate that none of the missile hit his home, but suffers nonetheless from a combination of debilitating factors, including at least a natural one: age. He is nearly 70, born in 1940 in Jaffa, in the former Palestine.
Mohammad, wife (right) and daughter inside leaky bedroom with broken walls
humble house needing repairs
Mohammad’s medical report and referral for surgery outside of Gaza
Until Mohammad fell off of his bicycle 6 months ago, injuring his lower left leg, he had worked as a cleaner, on the street, in homes, wherever he could get work. Post-accident, his doctor strongly advised him not to walk excessively, though out of necessity he’s had to ignore this. When I met him, he was walking in the other end of town, by the marina, collecting sellable bits of rubbish and imploring passersby for some token shekels.
Out of work, injured, and also blind in one eye -[he has a cataract in the left eye (Left traumatic vitreous hemorrhage) which he cannot get treatment for in Gaza. Despite having a referral for surgery in Israel he has yet been denied an exit permit by Israeli authorities]-Mohammad has his family to provide for, and now a house to try to repair.
The reverberations for the bombing around his home caused cracks all along where walls meet ceiling. Some of the cracks are a couple of inches deep, wall torn from roof. Cold air and rainwater stream in. The entire ceiling leaks, there isn’t a dry corner in the tiny 2.5 room and a kitchen home. One room, where his daughters sleep, has no actual roof: the ceiling, a layer of overlapping planks of plywood, is all that shelters from the elements.
Mohammad’s son is 34 but doesn’t contribute to the family income. “He’s got psychosis,” the parents explain. “And at night he cannot see at all.” In 1987, during the 1st Intifada, Israeli soldiers had come to the house and beat the boy, around 12 or 13 at the time.
My original query, how did this dignified elderly man end up so, begging and grateful for the smallest scrap, was answered yesterday.
On a visit to Ezbet Abed Rabbo during which I heard more harrowing testimonies of life under invasion, children shot dead before parents’ eyes, and being held captive for days on end, I took more photos than I could testimonies. Such is the widespread destruction in the eastern Jabaliya region that the testimonies will be spilling forth for weeks, if not longer.
Below are photos for which there wasn’t enough time that day to get the stories. Many of them speak for themselves, and the general theme is one of being held captive in one’s house or a neighbour’s for 3-5 days in general –in miserable conditions, without food, water, medicine, toilets…–and either having family members shot or being terrorized as captives who when finally released tried to run away only to be sniped or accosted by further Israeli snipers and soldiers positioned in occupied houses and on the streets.
Of those who survived the ordeal, or had evacuated before the land invasion, many came back to partially or completely destroyed homes. With no where else to live, some have erected tattered tents in the place of their houses, some are moving into refugee tents reminiscent of the 1948 expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland (the “Nakba”), when over 750,000 Palestinians were forced out of their homes, left to miserable conditions in refugee tents which have evolved into the densely inhabited refugee camps throughout Gaza and the West Bank (as well as those in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria).
While many buildings were evidently hit by missiles from F-16s, Apache helicopters, and the massive tanks occupying the area, others were leveled by bulldozers and by explosives, the remnants of which were littered in and around houses in the region.
My friend escorting me through the ravaged area pointed out of the Israeli invasion: “They make like art here,” of the houses. Indeed, Dali and Escher seem to have created these houses whose angles defy proportionality, which seem to melt into the earth.
He also pointed out various destroyed houses belonging to Fatah members, including one with a toppled roof resembling icing dripping off of a cake: it belonged to a high-up Fatah intelligence officer.
Down the road, Mahmoud Abed Rabbo stood outside a home which had housed 38 people. He said it was the 4th attack by invading Israeli soldiers on his house in 3 years, though by far the worst. He gestured to the A-frame which had been a normal 90 degree angle home, and said that his family had been home on Jan 7, when the Israeli military began heavy attacks on homes in the area.
“First, the Israeli army attacked around the house,” he said. “Then, the Israeli army attacked the home with 2 tank missiles. The radio said the army had declared a ceasefire from 1-4 pm, so our neighbours [the family of Khaled Abed Rabbo] left their home, to flee. They were carrying a white flag but the Israeli soldiers shot at them anyway, killing 2 children (2 year old, 1 year old), and injuring another child and an older man.”
At 2 pm, Mahmoud explained, the Israeli army detonated some explosives next to the wall of the house, then entered through the hole they’d made. His family was still inside.
He reported that the Israeli soldiers ordered his family to leave, to ‘go to Jabaliya and don’t turn back or we will kill you.’ Yet, he said they’d only gone about 200m down the road leading out of his area, arriving at the mosque, when they were stopped by more Israeli soldiers. The army picked out the young men, ordering the women and children to continue walking. Sixty men were led to a shelter for animals, their IDs were taken, and they were ordered to take off their clothes.
Naked except for their underclothes, they were used by the Israeli army as human shields while the army went house to house, knocking and blasting holes in walls to use as doors.
Mahmoud said that around 10 pm, most of the young men were released, all but 10 of them. Those 10 were abducted, believed to have been taken to Israel’s notorious Nakab prison. The rest were ordered rest to walk to Jabaliya, not to turn back or they would be killed.
When ground strikes finished and Israel army left the areas they had occupied, Mahmoud Abed Rabbo’s family, like many of those from Ezbet Abed Rabbo, came back home to find it destroyed.
[except for the first 4 photos (all of the Mahmoud Abed Rabbo home, in Ezbet Abed Rabbo), all others below are of different homes in the ravaged Ezbet Abed Rabbo area.]
Mahmoud Abed Rabbo searches his destroyed home
Destroyed home of Mahmoud Abed Rabbo
Mahmoud Abed Rabbo and wife outside their destroyed home
Explosive used to bring down a house
Spent explosive on the slanted floor of a former house
Destroyed home of Fatah intelligence officer
Tent camp for Gazans left homeless by Israeli attacks
“This is at the beginning, when they started digging survivors and bodies out of the rubble,” Abu Qusay said. Just a few weeks after being buried alive by the bombing which attacked the building he was in, only a mere scar at his left eyebrow hints at the ordeal.
Abu Qusay is in his thirties, is the father of 6 kids between the ages of 4-15, and has worked as a policeman and security guard for 14 years now. When the late President Yasser Arafat was alive, Abu Qusay was a bodyguard for wife Suha Arafat.
In recent times, since the election of Hamas, he has continued in his role as security guard, these days accompanying VIPs as well as being the Manager of security for international guests.
It is in this capacity that I met Abu Qusay and Hamsa, the latter killed during the war on Gaza.
In one of Gaza’s coastal hotel cafes, seascape in the background and F-16 flying overhead, Abu Qusay related his story: he is a survivor of the first attacks, during which an estimated 60 Israeli warplanes simultaneously targeted around 100 police stations, police training academies, civil and governmental offices, and other security-related posts throughout the Gaza Strip.
We had a meeting at the Montada, the Presidential compound. There were about 15 of us and we’d entered the 3 rd floor meeting room shortly after 11 am. I was sitting 2 seats from the manager at the head of the table, with a friend in between us and the other attendees spread around the table.
The manager was speaking when the first strikes hit.
[2:35, an F-16 flies low overhead, growls loudly. Abu Qusay stiffens, stops speaking suddenly, then resumes after a pause.]
The explosion itself was strange, unlike other bomb blasts. I felt an immense air pressure which pushed me to the ground. Then I heard the explosion of the buildings nearby. It was such a foreign sensation, I didn’t know what was going on.
I tried to open my eyes and found that I couldn’t. The air was thick with dust which blinded me. I felt something running down my face. I tried many times to open my eyes but the dust stung them so much that it was impossible for a while. Finally, I was able to keep them open but I still couldn’t see anything. Just a small hole of light. It seemed like I was facing a wall with a tiny break in it.
I felt someone’s foot at my head and told the person to get their shoe away from my face. I was still disoriented, still had no idea what had happened.I tried to push the shoe away but found that my arms were pinned behind me, as if handcuffed. There was still liquid streaming down my face and I realized it was blood.
I began to hear the screaming and moaning of people around me. Then I heard a woman’s voice, which I recognized as one of my colleagues. Then Hamsa’s voice, telling us to be patient.
I felt the crushing weight moving off of me and then realized I was being pulled out from what had been burying me: concrete blocks and the rubble of our building. I realize that the 3rd floor room where we had been meeting was now on the ground floor. Three floors brought down to ground level.
I woke up at Shifa hospital, realized I’d passed out at the bomb site. Around me, all around me, all I could see were bodies. Corpses and wounded were scattered on the floor of the emergency room. There were so many, too many for the beds. People with legs and arms amputated. People with hideous open wounds.
It was surreal: I had been in a meeting, then was buried under rubble, then was surrounded by so much death. I couldn’t grasp it, couldn’t understand what had happened.
I forgot myself, I lost myself. I forgot my pain when I saw a child who had been at a school near the Montada. His head was pierced with wounds. I got up, was walking around looking at everyone. I was absorbed by it. Doctors and others were telling me to sit down, stay put. Where are you going, you’re injured? they asked.
Living in Gaza, we expect anything from Israel. Any attacks. We’ve lived through so many invasions and bombings. But I couldn’t believe this, couldn’t believe the scale of what they had done. And I didn’t even know about the other areas of Gaza at the time.
I used to drive ambulances. I’d learned how because I believe its important to broaden my skills, and I’m always trying to do so. But in all my days of driving ambulances, I’d never seen injuries and dead as horrific as what I saw that day. So many amputations, decapitations even.
And I keep remembering that child, the one from the school nearby. Were there fighters in the school when Israel bombed nearby? What had that child done? What had any of us working for the government done? Could this ever happen to policemen in America, Canada, England…? How can these criminals who would bomb in areas where there are civilians, children coming from school, who kill animals and uproot trees not be recognized as terrorists? They’ve committed massacres on us.
Palestinians help a wounded man after Israeli air force attacked Gaza City December 27, 2008
Abu Qusay is obviously one of the luckier, having survived the bombing with limbs intact. Like so many Palestinians in Gaza, though, he lost a number of friends in the attacks. I try to imagine how it would be to lose more than one friend, say 10, or more than one family member, say 7, or like the Samouni family, 48. It’s impossible to imagine.
